It's a bit of a long story...

TL:DR The word "Mladica" translates to "Sprout". The song is about being born. The music video for it was really fun to make and inspired the completion of the actual song. Some great friends worked on it.


I've been wanting to collaborate with Mihajlo (Summer Deaths) again since our last collaboration on Okvir. He had sent me a bunch of tracks about a year ago, but nothing really came of it, as I had been struggling to write for a long time.

Shortly after I joined a "Song-a-Month" group in Toronto with some incredible artists. Every month we write and share a song with each other through Zoom. We all have to write a song based on the prompt of a randomly selected group member. For the month of June I chose the prompt "New Life" based on one of the members expecting their first child (Serendipitously it was also my birth month, but I only realized that later).

With that prompt in mind I looped one of Summer Deaths' tracks and just free flow improvised while vibing on the chill feel of the track. Listening to the song really did feel like being in the womb. The piano melody has an almost lullaby feel. I ended up using autotune as way of giving my voice a sort of nebulous otherworldly quality. And it was the first song I had completed in a long time that I legitimately felt excited about.


I had also simultaneously been talking to my brother Aleks about doing a music video. It had been a long time since we collaborated on a video together and we were both itching to do something creative. Originally this song wasn't even being considered as a candidate for a video. We were supposed to use an older unreleased track of mine. The deciding factor in us going with Mladica for the video was the location. We were living next to this really majestic forrest and since Rona hit we were sort of limited in our options. The forrest didn't fit visually with my other song. But it totally fit with this demo I had for Mladica. The forrest even came complete with a birth canal that we more than happy to feature in the video. We were also happy to be able to cast one of my fav Toronto artists Simon Thomas as an angel in the video.

Once we finished the video we were overjoyed with the new material, but suddenly had all this footage for an incomplete song. Belgrade based Summer Deaths and I quickly began sending tracks back and forth to each other. The song was slowly getting there, but felt like it was missing something. International Ensh member Kosta Jovanovic and Srdjan Popov of Sergio Lounge fame joined forces and recording guitar and bass. I wanted the outro of the song to have a different feel than the rest of the song. It has more of an organic/acoustic feel during the outro cause this is the part of the song where I'm actually born.

The result of all of this is this great song and great video that would not have happened had it not been for the wonderful support of so many great people.

Please support all the artists I mentioned:

Han Oslo:
hanoslo.bandcamp.com/releases
Sergio Lounge:
sergiolounge.bandcamp.com/album/the-loungest
Simon Thomas:
simonthomas.bandcamp.com